Via Kuriositas, this was a must-have for personal security during the height of the Victorian corpse-snatching era: Medical students in the United Kingdom of the nineteenth century faced a quandary. They had…

The altogether delightful Museum of Imaginary Instruments features not-quite-yet-real musical devices that hover at the boundaries of physical law and the human senses. Take, for instance, electronica pioneer Wendy Carlos’s dream keyboard…

Leia Display Systems is working on reducing the size of their impressive hologram-video machines to the point where you will make three-dimensional phone calls. Via the Mirror:

A Star Wars-style phone which allows users to see 3D hologram images of the person on the other end of the line has been pioneered by experts at Leia Display Systems, a Polish company named after the film’s heroine.

To make a call, the person sits in front of a camera which has two lenses and a microphone. The two images formed by the lenses are streamed through to the person on the other end. A hologram machine then projects them onto a screen of water vapour.

“At the moment, our holograms are made using machines that are more than six feet high but we are designing smaller versions. We hope to sell hologram telephone devices within the next five years,” Chief executive Marcin Panek said.

The legacy of Buckminster Fuller, one of America’s greatest minds of the 20th century, lives on, largely due to the dynamic Buckminster Fuller Institute and its annual Challenge, which awards cash prizes…

As disinfonauts well know, any cool invention from science fiction will eventually become science reality, Iron Man suits are on the way reports the Los Angeles Times:

Army Capt. Brian Dowling was leading his Special Forces team through a steep mountain pass in eastern Afghanistan when insurgents ambushed his patrol, leaving two of his soldiers pinned down with life-threatening wounds.

After a furious firefight, the two men were rescued, but that episode in 2006 would change Dowling’s life.

Now employed by a small defense company, he is part of a crash effort by U.S. Special Operations Command to produce a radically new protective suit for elite soldiers to wear into battle — one with bionic limbs, head-to-toe armor, a built-in power supply and live data feeds projected on a see-through display inside the helmet.

They call it — what else? — the “Iron Man suit.”

“We’re taking the Iron Man concept and bringing it closer to reality,” said Dowling, referring to the Marvel Comics character Tony Stark, an industrialist and master engineer who builds a rocket-powered exoskeleton, turning himself into a superhero.

The Special Operations Command began soliciting ideas for the suit this year from industry, academia and government labs, and has held two conferences where potential bidders, including Dowling’s company, Revision Military, demonstrated their products. Military officials say they are trying to produce a working prototype within the next 12 months. But no contracts have been signed, and the Pentagon has not ventured to make a cost estimate…

In a project titled Scent-ography: a post-visual past time, designer Amy Radcliffe has created the MADELEINE, a device which records an odor’s molecular information. Rendered a formula, the unique smell can be…

Scared that you are falling behind the times? Via Zapato Productions intradimensional: The front panel button switches the display to show paradigm confidence levels in real time — caution when it lingers…

How does it work? Algorithms, duh. Via the Telegraph: Ali Razeghi, a Tehran scientist has registered “The Aryayek Time Traveling Machine” with the state-run Centre for Strategic Inventions. The device can predict…

Technology and nature to become indistinguishable, New Scientist writes: Computers made from living cells, anyone? Two groups of researchers have independently built the first biological analogue of the transistor. It should make…